The Health Information Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and other legal mandates have heightened the safeguards protecting patient privacy and medical confidentiality in many regards. Healthcare information management (HIM) professionals are now confronted with an array of procedural and substantive requirements which have been put in place to ensure that a person's medical condition or records are not inappropriately disclosed to third parties. In response to those and other compliance requirements, various information technology platforms have been deployed with a goal of managing patient records and privacy.
Much of the task of medical privacy management revolves around protecting access to, and recording disclosure activity from, the patient's electronic medical record (EMR). Certain commercial platforms have been deployed which automate or assist in the task of medical record publishing or dissemination from the EMR as one task, and request management in the sense of documenting release of information (ROI) requests by health insurers and others as another. Patient consent capture and archiving information requests which are made not for release of an EMR, but other purposes, form other tasks which HIM managers must manage on a day to day basis in hospitals and other medical facilities.
However, such privacy management tools as exist do not permit an information manager to completely monitor and archive the whole privacy life cycle including receiving and conditioning medical information based on legal guidelines, capturing the set of patient consents that surround that information, managing release requests made for that information, tracking medical record publishing activity when a release is validated and also tracking ancillary or non-release requests, as well. Since no integrated platform exists which can manage all such access and publishing functions, nor to further integrate the tracking of paper information release versus electronic publishing, HIM managers are left with the less satisfactory choice of operating multiple platforms to accomplish the array of necessary tasks. In another regard, managers and facilities which lack even partial information tools must also manually record paper requests and other hardcopy activity which, is not or can not be reflected in or stored by electronic media. Other problems in healthcare information technology and privacy management exist.